Thought Experiment #5 : Galileo’s Balls
The second to last in our look at Wired magazine’s Thought Experiments. Today we consider Galileo and his…um…balls:
Contrary to what you teachers told you, Galileo Galilei likely did not drop balls from the Tower of Pisa; he conducted the gravity experiment in the laboratory of his mind. his 16th-century peers believed heavier objects fell faster than light ones. So Galileo imagined a heavy ball attached by a string to a light ball. Would the light ball create drag and slow the heavy one down? Nope, he concluded, they would hit the ground simultaneously.
How could you possibly come to that conclusion without actual scientific observation? There are all sorts of conclusions to scientific problems I can come up with in my head, but all need empirical observations to prove.